The Maldives: Regressing To A Wahhabi / Salafi "Stone Age"

If there is a recurring theme within political Islam it is the permanent jihad to wipe out any trace of non-Muslim civilization. Once you appreciate that you’ll begin to see the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Mosque built over the Jewish Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the persecution of Christians in Muslim lands and the spread of “no-go” neighborhoods in Europe in an entirely new light.

I will be beginning most posts on Islam with that quote, as it distills political Islam down to its fundamental tactic. It cuts through all of the deception, all of the lies, and all of the West's misguided projection of benign motivations on the Islamists, from Palestine to those in our own midst. It works to analyze Islam from day 1 of the Hijrah through today. And it has special importance for the advance of Wahhabism within the Islamic community itself.

I have been pointing out for years that, while there are many schools of Islam, it is the Wahhabi / Salafi sect - being spread throughout the world on Saudi petrodollars - that poses a supreme danger, not merely to the West, but to all other forms of Islam. A series of columns in the news from the Maldives drives home both Islam's "permanent jihad" and the dangerous spread of Wahhabism.

The Maldives are a series of Islands in the Indian Ocean. The nation has long been Islamic, though the indigenous form was Sufism. Since the 1980's, the influence of Wahhabism has been growing - with devastating effects. By the mid-1990's, the country adopted a Constitution that enshrined Islam as the state religion and made it illegal for anyone to practice any other faith in the Maldives. But that is just one aspect of the Wahhabist poison at work. The Volokh Conspiracy posted this the other day:

As reported by the Maldivian newspaper Haveeru, “President Mohamed Nasheed yesterday called on citizens to reject religious extremism and continue to support the ‘traditional form’ of Islam that has been practiced in the Maldives for the past 800 years,” and in particular said:

Should we ban music? Should we mutilate girls’ genitals? Should we allow nine year-olds to be married? Should we forbid art and drawing? Should we be allowed to take concubines? Is this nation building? ....

This is an old country, people have lived here for thousands of years and we have practised Islam for more than 800 years. In 2011, we are faced with a question, how should we build our nation: what we will teach our children, how should we live our lives and what we will leave for future generations? ...

Some people are saying that the government is going against religion because we won’t deviate from the traditional form of Islam ....

[I] asked you to come here in support of the middle, tolerant path. And I believe that most citizens want to continue our traditional form of Islam. . . .

To build our economy we need foreign investments and we need to create an environment in which foreigners can invest ....

We can’t achieve development by going backwards to the Stone Age or being ignorant.

And indeed, Wahhabi / Salafi Islam is a direct step not back to the stone ages, nor even to the time Mohammed, but rather to Ibn Taymiyyah's 12th century brutal and draconian vision of the time of Mohammed, as well as his articulation of the doctrine of takfir - that Islamists can label others as apostates for failing to follow the Taymiyyah / Wahhab / Salafi strand of Islam, and kill them for it. As doctor and former terrorist Tawfiq Hamid warned a few years ago: "The civilized world ought to recognize the immense danger that Salafi Islam poses; it must become informed, courageous and united if it is to protect both a generation of young Muslims and the rest of humanity from the disastrous consequences of this militant ideology."

The degree to which Wahhabi / Salafi Islam had grown in his country and its toxic effects were further explored by Maryam Omidi in the Guardian:

An Islamic scholar is facing flak for not wearing the right beard. We must not let Wahhabism suffocate this island nation's identity, writes Maryam Omidi, editor of Maldives-based website Minivan News.

On his recent visit to the Maldives, Salih Yucel, a Turkish Islamic scholar and lecturer at Monash University in Australia, was rejected by his fellow Muslims who deemed his beard too short and his trousers too long for him to be a bona fide Muslim. The response to the former imam came as no surprise, being symptomatic of the puritanical Wahhabism taking root in the Indian Ocean archipelago, a favourite haunt of honeymooners and A-list celebrities.

The country's legislative architecture entrenches this intolerance, in a constitution that recognises only Muslims as citizens and a Religious Unity Act that stringently demarcates the type of Islam to be practised. Nor are the country's non-Muslim expatriates, largely Buddhist Sri Lankans and Hindu Indians, permitted to practise their faiths in public as all places of worship apart from mosques are banned. The intolerance does not end here: for Wahhabis, even other Muslims, such as Shias and Sufis, are apostates.

The onset of Wahhabism in the country can be linked to a rise of the ultraconservative ideology in the region, above all in Pakistan, where many Maldivians travel for a free education at one of its madrasas. While the teachings at the vast majority of these institutions are benign, there are those, financed by Saudi Arabia, that serve as conduits for the Wahhabi ideology.

Wahhabism, a back to basics Islam, states adherents must follow the way of the Prophet Muhammad and his disciples to the letter. The result has been a doctrinaire outlook among devotees and a repudiation of the Maldives' historically moderate past.

As with other countries in the region such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, Islam in the Maldives was suffused with elements of Sufism; further, unique to the island nation are the influences absorbed from its Buddhist past. But today, a conflict between these traditions and calls for greater orthodoxy is palpable.

Many pin the upsurge in radicalism on former president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, an Egyptian-educated scholar, who according to one journalist, brought Islam to the forefront of the nation's identity at the expense of other cultural attributes. The upshot has been the destruction of indigenous Islam in the Maldives and a cultural identity crisis.

The losers in this formerly matriarchal society have been women and girls. A groundswell of devotion over recent years has led to the number of headscarves worn soaring, though often through social pressure rather than piety.

More recently, families refusing to send their daughters to school or vaccinate their children, while uncommon, are beginning to worry the authorities. More alarming are reports about men keeping underage girls as concubines to have sex with when their wives are menstruating. Although yet to be verified, the reports have moved the Maldivian president Mohamed Nasheed to call for an investigation. While the Ministry of Islamic Affairs denounced concubinage as un-Islamic, for many it was a nod to the practice of taking slave-girls as concubines during the prophet's time.

In July, I wrote an article about the gender disparity in issuing punishments for those convicted of premarital sex, for which the sentence under sharia law is 100 lashes. While pregnancy incriminates women, men deny their involvement in the act and get off scot-free. Latest statistics from 2006 revealed that out of 184 people sentenced to the punishment, 146 were women. The article and Amnesty International's consequent call for a moratorium on flogging led to protests demanding my deportation and the resignations of the foreign minister, an MP and the Maldivian high commissioner to the UK, all of whom I quoted in the article.

What the protests underscored was the absence of a public space for religious debate. While a predominantly moderate sentiment may still exist, the few bold enough to ask questions are labelled un-Islamic or worse still, intimidated into silence. A recent announcement by the minister of Islamic affairs that only scholars well-versed in the Qur'an should speak about religion affairs tightened the screws further.

The rise of Wahhabism is one of the many challenges the fledging democracy has to face. Although led by a young, liberal president, the coalition government's failure to encourage dialogue on religion has precluded the possibility of alternative narratives taking hold.

The government's ambitions to reappropriate its heritage through the restoration of its Buddhist sites and the introduction of Maldivian history in schools may be one antidote. Another lies in the country's largely young population. While outwardly at least devotion has rocketed, behind closed doors, many young people hunger for an Islamic reformation. The question is, who will dare to lead the way?

What is happening in the Maldives is happening throughout the Islamic world, from Turkey to Indonesia to Egypt. It has already involved us in two wars since the turn of the millennium. It will surely involve us in many more if we do not heed Dr. Hamid's advice and begin fully engaging in the war of ideas to counteract this poison.

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The War Against Radical Islam & The Battlefield of Ideas

Andrew McCarthy, writing at NRO, is effuse in his praise for Newt Gingrich's remarks concerning our war against "radical Islam" in both its militaristic and 'fifth column' forms. Gingrich, he says, is that exceedingly rare combination of a politician who both understands the nature of the threat and is willing to speak out about it honestly. This from Mr. McCarthy:

. . . Gingrich grasps that there is an enemy here and that it is a mortal threat to freedom. He knows that if we are to remain a free people, it is an enemy we must defeat. That enemy is Islamism, and its operatives — whether they come as terrorists or stealth saboteurs — are the purveyors of sharia, Islam’s authoritarian legal and political system. . . .

The single purpose of this jihad is the imposition of sharia. On that score, Gingrich made two points of surpassing importance. First, some Islamists employ mass-murder attacks while others prefer a gradual march through our institutions — our legal, political, academic, and financial systems, as well as our broader culture; the goal of both, though, is the same. The stealth Islamists occasionally feign outrage at the terrorists, but their quarrel is over methodology and pace. Both camps covet the same outcome.

Second, that outcome is the death of freedom. In Islamist ideology, sharia is deemed to be the necessary precondition for Islamicizing a society — for Islam is not merely a religious doctrine, but a comprehensive socio-economic and political system. As the former speaker elaborated, sharia embodies principles and punishments that are abhorrent to Western values. Indeed, its foundational premise is anti-American, holding that we are not free people at liberty to govern ourselves irrespective of any theocratic code, that people are instead beholden to the Islamic state, which is divinely enjoined to impose Allah’s laws.

Sharia, moreover, is anti-equality. It subjugates women and brutally punishes transgressors, particularly homosexuals and apostates. While our law forbids cruel and unusual punishments, Gingrich observed that the brutality in sharia sanctions is not gratuitous, but intentional: It is meant to enforce Allah’s will by striking example.

On this last point, Gingrich offered a salient insight, one well worth internalizing in the Sun Tzu sense of knowing one’s enemy. Islamists, violent or not, have very good reasons for the wanting to destroy the West. Those reasons are not crazy or wanton — and they have nothing to do with Gitmo, Israel, cartoons, or any other excuse we conjure to explain the savagery away. Islamists devoutly believe, based on a well-founded interpretation of Islamic doctrine, that they have been commanded by Allah to kill, convert, or subdue all who do not adhere to sharia — because they regard Allah as their only master (“There is no God but Allah”). It is thus entirely rational (albeit frightening to us) that they accept the scriptural instruction that the very existence of those who resist sharia is offensive to Allah, and that a powerful example must be made of those resisters in order to induce the submission of all — “submission” being the meaning of Islam.

It makes no sense to dismiss our enemies as lunatics just because “secular socialist” elites, as Gingrich called them, cannot imagine a fervor that stems from religious devotion. We ought to respect our enemies, he said. Not “respect” in Obama-speak, which translates as “appease,” but in the sense of taking them seriously, understanding that they are absolutely determined to win, and realizing that they are implacable. There is no “moderate” sharia devotee, for sharia is not moderate. . . . Islamism is not a movement to be engaged, it is an enemy to be defeated.

Victory, Gingrich said, will be very long in coming — longer, perhaps, than the nearly half-century it took to win the Cold War. . . .

Debate over all of this is essential. The crucial point is that we must have the debate with eyes open. It is a debate about which Gingrich has put down impressive markers: The main front in the war is not Afghanistan or Iraq but the United States. The war is about the survival of Western civilization, and we should make no apologies for the fact that the West’s freedom culture is a Judeo-Christian culture — a fact that was unabashedly acknowledged, Gingrich reminded his audience, by FDR and Churchill. To ensure victory in the United States we must, once again, save Europe, where the enemy has advanced markedly. There is no separating our national security and our economic prosperity — they are interdependent. And while the Middle East poses challenges of immense complexity, Gingrich contended that addressing two of them — Iran, the chief backer of violent jihad, and Saudi Arabia, the chief backer of stealth jihad — would go a long way toward improving our prospects on the rest.

Most significant, there is sharia. By pressing the issue, Newt Gingrich accomplishes two things. First, he gives us a metric for determining whether those who would presume to lead us will fight or surrender. Second, at long last, someone is empowering truly moderate Muslims — assuming they exist in the numbers we’re constantly assured of. Our allies are the Muslims who embrace our freedom culture — those for whom sharia is a matter of private belief, not public mission. Our enemies are those who want sharia to supplant American law and Western culture. When we call out the latter, and marginalize them, we may finally energize the former. . . .

These are points that I have been making ad infinitum on this blog. For but one example, see National Security At The End Of Obama's First Year (its a long post - scroll half way through to get to the section on 'war of ideas'). The bottom line is that we have to engage in the war of ideas or the Islamist's war against the West will still be being fought by our grandchildren's grandchildren. Moreover, given the push of radicals for weapons of mass destruction, the far too widespread support for radicals throughout the Islamic world, and the continued push of Salafi Islam into the West on the back of Saudi petrodollars, the chances are very high that the war will likely become far more bloody and expensive as time goes on, as well as ever more threatening to the fundamental freedoms of Western civilization. This is a war that we could indeed lose if we fail to engage.

Step one in the war of ideas is to identify the enemy. We have to expose Wahhabi / Salafi Islam and shine a light on it in to engage the strongest force in any democracy - public opinion. Bush never did this. Obama is exponentially worse, pretending that there is no threat to the West originating out of Islam. It is not merely an incredibly dangerous falsehood, it is treasonous. Gingrich is the first major politician of either party to step up.

Dafydd ab Hugh at Big Lizards has done two recent posts on this topic, both of which should be required reading. In Brilliance At Midnight, Dafydd notes that the threat from radical Islam to Western society is really two fold:

The take-away from the massive dumping of leaked U.S. military documents on WikiLeaks, documents related to the conduct and progress of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is this: The putative "rift" between Islamist terrorists on the one hand, and radical Islamists who "reject terrorism" (at specific times and places) on the other hand, has nothing to do with any ultimate goal of Islamism.

The rift reflects only a difference of opinion about the precise strategies and tactics for achieving that goal. Islamist victory conditions are the same in both groups: a pure, radical Islamism dominant across the globe, with sharia the final law in every country. . . .

Our soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq are involved in the physical war against this threat, but in the long run, it is the war of ideas that matters more. In Brilliance at Midnight - the Dawn, Dafydd flushes out the tools available to us to engage in the war of ideas:

. . . The most important task before launching into a war of ideas is to fully arm and equip our "soldiers" -- in this case, our soldiers comprise all Americans willing and able to defend Western values of individual liberty, property and Capitalism, freedom of speech and religion (not merely freedom of worship, as Obama would have it), actual rule of law, and governance by the consent of the governed. Bluntly, I mean educating the masses about the Grand Jihad, its goals, its methods, and the existential danger it poses. . . .

Do read both of his posts. We fail to engage in the war of ideas at our own existential peril.

Lastly, as to Gingrich himself, I wrote recently that I consider him the best candidate for President the Republicans could field in 2012. His above remarks on the threat we face from Islamism merely increase my conviction exponentially.

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UK's Highly Radicalized Islamic Students

The above is a graphic from the Daily Mail summarizing the troubling results of a study on the attitudes of the UK's Muslims in colleges and universities.
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The study referenced above was carried out by the UK's Centre for Social Cohesion. You can find the full results of the study, the methodology and the raw numbers in their report here. This study tracks completely with an earlier study released by Professor Anthony Glees, the director of Brunel University's Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, warning that Britain's colleges and universities were heavilly infiltrated by radical Salafists, radical Salafist organizations, and were heavilly influenced by large grants from Saudi Arabia and other Muslim donors. This in fact is a blue print for how Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood have long sought to bring Salafi Islam to dominance in the West. It is occurring in the U.S. also, though not anywhere as effectively and efficiently in the UK whose Muslim population is easilly the most radicalized in Europe.

Here is the summary of the study from the Daily Mail:

Nearly one third of Muslim students believe it can be acceptable to kill in the name of religion, according to a survey published yesterday.

It also found that 40 per cent want to see the introduction of Islamic sharia law in Britain, 40 per cent think it wrong for Muslim men and women to mix freely together, and 33 per cent want to see a worldwide Islamic government based on sharia law.

The findings were described by researchers at the Centre for Social Cohesion think tank, which commissioned the poll, as 'deeply alarming'.

. . . The Centre for Social Cohesion, founded last year to study religion and tolerance, has drawn attention to the extremist influence of Islamic societies and study centres at British universities.

The survey was based on a YouGov poll of 1,400 students, 600 of them Muslims, at 12 universities with influential Islamic societies.

These included eight in London, among them the London School of Economics, Imperial College, and the School of Oriental and African Studies, and the universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Leicester and Manchester.

It found that a large minority of Muslim students express views that are strongly socially conservative or which suggest they are open to extremist thinking.

While 32 per cent justified killing in the name of religion if the religion was under attack, 60 per cent of students active in Islamic societies did so. Four per cent thought killing to promote religion was permissible.

More than half, 54 per cent, wanted an Islamic political party to stand up for Muslims at Westminster.

. . . Report author Hannah Stuart said: 'These findings are deeply alarming. Students in higher education are the future leaders of their communities, yet significant numbers of them appear to hold beliefs which contravene liberal, democratic values.

'These results are deeply embarrassing for those who have said that there is no extremism in British universities.'

Miss Stewart also said that ministers should be wary about treating university Islamic societies as representative because their members appeared to be more extreme than other Muslim students.

. . . Concerns over extremism among the 90,000 Muslims studying at British universities have grown alongside the spread of radical groups, including the Hizb ut-Tahrir organisation which Tony Blair said in 2005 should be banned.

Terrorists who have passed through British universities include Kafeel Ahmed, who died after driving a burning vehicle into a Glasgow airport terminal last year, and Jawad Akbar, jailed for life in April 2007 for conspiring to attack shopping malls and nightclubs. He was said to have become involved in militancy while a student at Brunel University.

Read the entire article. Though unmentioned in the above article, the actual report goes into more detail, showing the differences in attitudes between those Muslims studying UK Universties who are members of the Islamic student groups and those who are not. The difference in attitudes are significant.

Possibly the best source for an understanding of the problems with radicalization in the West being driven by Salafists and being opposed by "moderate" Muslims in the West is the debate between devout Muslim reformer Zhudi Jasser and a Salafi Imam that you can find here. If you have not watched it, it perfectly encapsulates the war that is going on today for the heart and soul of Islam.

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UK's Prep Schools For Dhimmis Not Completely Successful

A part of Labour's multicultural program in response to the ever greater radicalization of UK's Muslim population is to pretend that no real problem exists beyond an insufficient spirit of tolerance and understanding of Islam amongst the British natives. Thus a few months ago, Jacqui Smith, Labour's Home Secretary, announced that the Labour government would spend millions of pounds towards this end - teaching a whitewashed version of Islam to the UK's schoolchildren. It seems, however, that at least some of the students have far more sense then their teachers, the Anglican Archbishop, the Lord High Justice, and all of Britain's chattering class put together. Two UK students, ages 11 and 12, have been given detention for refusing to kneel and pray to Allah.
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This from the Daily Times:

Two schoolboys were given detention after refusing to kneel down and 'pray to Allah' during a religious education lesson.

Parents were outraged that the two boys from year seven (11 to 12-year-olds) were punished for not wanting to take part in the practical demonstration of how Allah is worshipped.

They said forcing their children to take part in the exercise at Alsager High School, near Stoke-on-Trent - which included wearing Muslim headgear - was a breach of their human rights. . . .

parent Karen Williams said: "I am absolutely furious my daughter was made to take part in it and I don't find it acceptable.

"I haven't got a problem with them teaching my child other religions and a small amount of information doesn't do any harm.

"But not only did they have to pray, the teacher had gone into the class and made them watch a short film and then said 'we are now going out to pray to Allah'.

"Then two boys got detention and all the other children missed their refreshment break because of the teacher.

"Not only was it forced upon them, my daughter was told off for not doing it right.

"They'd never done it before and they were supposed to do it in another language."

"My child has been forced to pray to Allah in a school lesson." The grandfather of one of the pupils in the class said: "It's absolutely disgusting, there's no other way of putting it. . . .

Read the entire article. We should all support teaching Islam in schools - but only reality. That is something far removed from the dhimmi prep being carried out by Labour these days. And it does a tremendous disservice to those Muslims who embrace the West, who have no desire to see Sharia law imposed on the West, and are attempting to bring their religion into the 21st century. While the above example of making students pray to Allah is no doubt extreme and an anamoly, it highlights the insanity of Labour and the UK's chattering classes who believe that increasing the acceptance of a whitewashed version Islam among the UK's non-Muslim population will effect in the slightest the serious problem the UK faces with radical Isalm. Indeed, it can only be counterproductive.

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Bang That Drum, Dr. Pipes

Step one to defeating an enemy - identify it. This is a drum I've been beating in this "war on terror" for years. Indeed, as I wrote six months ago, "Western governments are failing in their duty to define 'radical Islam.'" It is in the ideological battlefield that we will ultimately defeat radical Islam - or face the prospect of being ever threatened by it. There are a lot of individual Muslims and small groups who have joined that fight and are today in an existential contest for the heart and soul of their religion. Arrayed against them are the Salafists, Deobandis and Khomeinists - the radical Islamists - funded with near unlimited oil wealth. By failing to acknowledge this struggle and identify our enemy, we have yet to even join the fight - one equally as important to our security as Iraq and Afghanistan. Dr. Daniel Pipes weighs in on precisely the same topic.
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This from Dr. Pipes:

If you cannot name your enemy, how can you defeat it? Just as a physician must identify a disease before curing a patient, so a strategist must identify the foe before winning a war. Yet Westerners have proven reluctant to identify the opponent in the conflict the U.S. government variously (and euphemistically) calls the "global war on terror," the "long war," the "global struggle against violent extremism," or even the "global struggle for security and progress."

This timidity translates into an inability to define war goals. Two high-level U.S. statements from late 2001 typify the vague and ineffective declarations issued by Western governments. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld defined victory as establishing "an environment where we can in fact fulfill and live [our] freedoms." In contrast, George W. Bush announced a narrower goal, "the defeat of the global terror network" – whatever that undefined network might be.

"Defeating terrorism" has, indeed, remained the basic war goal. By implication, terrorists are the enemy and counterterrorism is the main response.

But observers have increasingly concluded that terrorism is just a tactic, not an enemy. Bush effectively admitted this much in mid-2004, acknowledging that "We actually misnamed the war on terror." Instead, he called the war a "struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies and who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world."

A year later, in the aftermath of the 7/7 London transport bombings, British prime minister Tony Blair advanced the discussion by speaking of the enemy as "a religious ideology, a strain within the world-wide religion of Islam." Soon after, Bush himself used the terms "Islamic radicalism," "militant Jihadism," and "Islamo-fascism." But these words prompted much criticism and he backtracked.

. . . In fact, that enemy has a precise and concise name: Islamism, a radical utopian version of Islam. Islamists, adherents of this well funded, widespread, totalitarian ideology, are attempting to create a global Islamic order that fully applies the Islamic law (Shari‘a).

Thus defined, the needed response becomes clear. It is two-fold: vanquish Islamism and help Muslims develop an alternative form of Islam. Not coincidentally, this approach roughly parallels what the allied powers accomplished vis-à-vis the two prior radical utopian movements, fascism and communism.

First comes the burden of defeating an ideological enemy. As in 1945 and 1991, the goal must be to marginalize and weaken a coherent and aggressive ideological movement, so that it no longer attracts followers nor poses a world-shaking threat. World War II, won through blood, steel, and atomic bombs, offers one model for victory, the Cold War, with its deterrence, complexity, and nearly-peaceful collapse, offers quite another.

Victory against Islamism, presumably, will draw on both these legacies and mix them into a novel brew of conventional war, counterterrorism, counterpropaganda, and many other strategies. At one end, the war effort led to the overthrow of the Taliban government in Afghanistan; at the other, it requires repelling the lawful Islamists who work legitimately within the educational, religious, media, legal, and political arenas.

The second goal involves helping Muslims who oppose Islamist goals and wish to offer an alternative to Islamism's depravities by reconciling Islam with the best of modern ways. But such Muslims are weak, being but fractured individuals who have only just begun the hard work of researching, communicating, organizing, funding, and mobilizing.

To do all this more quickly and effectively, these moderates need non-Muslim encouragement and sponsorship. However unimpressive they may be at present, moderates, with Western support, alone hold the potential to modernize Islam, and thereby to terminate the threat of Islamism.

In the final analysis, Islamism presents two main challenges to Westerners: To speak frankly and to aim for victory. Neither comes naturally to the modern person, who tends to prefer political correctness and conflict resolution, or even appeasement. But once these hurdles are overcome, the Islamist enemy's objective weakness in terms of arsenal, economy, and resources means it can readily be defeated.

Read the entire article. To see the ideological struggle for the heart of Islam in stark relief, I suggest that you watch Parts II and III (at least) of Dr. Zhudi Jasser's debate with a Salafi Imam that I have posted here. Step one for our government to insure Dr. Jasser wins is for the U.S. to join the ideological battle. We fail to do so at our peril.

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Dr. Jasser On The War of Ideas In Islam

M. Zhudi Jasser, the chairman of American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), engaged in a debate (video here) with a Salafi imam, discussing radical Islam and alternative interpretations of the Koran. It is the penultimate battlefield for the soul of Islam between the radicals and the "moderates." In his essay below, Dr. Jasser discusses the debate within the larger context of this war of ideals.


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This from Dr. Jasser at AIFD:

A public debate between two devotional Muslims occurred on April 5, 2008 at Edison College in Naples, Florida. We shared deeply conflicting ideas on Islam, political Islam, terrorism, and morality. Arguments so far seemingly relegated to “Muslim vs. non-Muslims” debates due to the Muslim activist predominance of the Islamist mindset were finally debated from a position deep within a Muslim consciousness.

Already a tired phrase, call it what you will, “the battle,” “the war,” “the contest” of ideas between the West (secular democracies) and the Muslim world (Islamist theocracies) remains an elusive target for many of us in the thick of the fight. As an American, the concept of debate and intellectual argumentation runs to the core of who I am. So many other anti-Islamist Muslims and I can imagine no other method of getting our ideas across to the “other” side whether discussing the political, religious, legal, social, or spiritual realm. But when it comes to our current target – the threat of political Islam within the devotional Muslim consciousness – leading Islamist figures in the U.S. have remained slippery targets, unwilling to engage anti-Islamists openly in the public square.

These elusive Islamists include a host of “political imams” (imams who use their pulpit to preach an Islamist domestic and foreign policy agenda) who are apparently a majority of imams in mosques around the U.S. Not only are political imams in the majority of mosques but the salafist orientation seems to predominate mosques also. This is augmented in the public place with their supporting and collaborating Islamist organizations which include ISNA (Islamic Society of North America), CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), MAS (Muslim American Society), ICNA (Islamic Circle of North America), MSA (Muslim Students Association), the North American Imams Federation, The Assembly of American Muslim Jurists, and the MPAC (Muslim Public Affairs Council) to name a few. That, in and of itself, is telling. However, the obvious nature of their avoidance behavior in engaging anti-Islamists is not enough or even a start in the effort to win the “hearts and minds” of Muslims.

The entirety of mosques and Islamist and anti-Islamist Muslim organizations do not represent all American Muslims. Most American Muslims are actually unaffiliated with any element of the organized Muslim community. Some, if not most, are unaffiliated simply because they separate religion and politics. In fact, statistics would show that only a small minority of American Muslims maintain membership in any “Muslim” organizations.

The ideas expressed in this debate will possibly expose why. Most Islamist organizations and imams have little to no moral leadership or credibility when they espouse apologetics and excuses trying to convince the world that moral imperatives have exceptions. Hopefully the mainstream media, government officials, and the average non-Muslim American will begin to see that “Islamists” are in no way synonymous with “Muslims.” The “battle for the soul of Islam” between Islamists and anti-Islamists needs to be forged expeditiously or the Islamists will assiduously continue their grand scheme of eventual and total domination.

Since its inception, the American Islamic Forum for Democracy was created by anti-Islamist Muslims upon a foundation that our guiding ideologies simply need to be heard in the Muslim community. Then, let the chips fall where they may. With that public hearing, or “forum,” we will begin to openly challenge the ossified precepts of salafism, Wahhabism, Islamism, and various pre-modern identifications of eastern Muslim culture. With that challenge we pray that an awakening – possibly very similar to the modernization of the West, which ushered in “enlightenment” – may occur within the consciousness of Muslims everywhere, forever separating spiritual Islam or the domain of God (faith) from the domain of government and the state (reason).

It is direct forays between Islamists and anti-Islamists which highlight the profound areas of disagreement. For example, when AIFD sponsored the nation’s first Muslim rally against terrorism in 2004 entitled “Standing with Muslims Against Terrorism” and invited the local Islamist Politburo (also known as the “Valley council of imams”) to join us in a universal unqualified condemnation of terrorism, they explicitly refused citing a host of morally defunct explanations. As a group, they refused to make a public moral imperative without qualifications (apologetics) about American foreign policy as an excuse for terrorism. They not only stayed home from the rally despite repeated public calls to join us, but the imams have also repeatedly refused to go on record regarding AIFD’s mission of ideologically engaging Islamism, let alone directly engage anti-Islamists. In fact in the 2007 controversial documentary by ABG Films Islam v Islamists, local imam, Ahmed Shqeirat described our work as “liberal extremism.”

The debate this week against an imam in Naples proved that these apologetics are apparently and most unfortunately common across the nation (from Arizona to Florida) in many imam circles as a litmus test for Islamists who believe in political Islam and the Islamic state. Make no mistake: my opponents in the clerical realm try to brush off our work as “anti-imam” or anti-scholarship in Islam. A cartoon in a local Islamist publication tried to portray just such propaganda against me in 2005. The reality is quite the contrary. Many humble scholarly imams have provided the intellectual underpinnings for our anti-Islamist Muslim precepts at AIFD. In fact it is the persona of the morally corrupt imam who has been the greatest liability for the real scholars of Islam who are the anti-Islamist, anti-Wahhabi imams of virtue which are so marginalized in the American public square.

This challenge of opening this debate and even acknowledging its existence is no small undertaking, considering the number of Islamist forces working within the Muslim community against such an awakening. Further challenges include tendencies of the general public to accept minority and identity politics in the U.S. and the inherent Islamist exploitation of that in order to further tribal behavior and foment divisiveness in America. By doing so, they craftily avoid self-critique, not to mention the collaborating forces outside the Muslim community (mainstream media and many U.S. Government officials) that are all too ready to accept Islamist ideology as the de facto consensus of the orientation of the faithful.

Yet, frustratingly, many anti-Islamist Muslims have been standing alone ready to challenge the Islamist position within the Muslim community, unable to gain any traction against the conventional wisdom that Islam is Islamism and Islamists are the only devotional Muslims. Geert Wilders’ film Fitna, Ayaan hirsi Ali’s Infidel and other expressions exposing radical Islamist ideology are able to conflate Islam with political Islam and militant Islam because they have been almost inarguably unable to find a palpable debate within the Muslim community concerning the ideas they critique. Islamists often whine in an oversimplified denial immersed in pathetic victimology, while anti-Islamist Muslims remain unheard and unable to find a forum.

Certainly, many anti-Islamist Muslims have been writing and speaking out all over the world. But we have generally been “preaching to the choir” and past the Islamists and their collaborators who disagree with us. Why have we have often ended up speaking “past” them? The answer is their unwillingness to engage openly in a debate over our central differences on Islam and the Muslim consciousness. Theirs is a strategy cloaked in deliberately ignoring the debate and deliberately clouding Islam with Islamism – much to the chagrin of the average non-Islamist Muslim.

The Islamists conveniently call internal challenges to their theology a manifestation of a societal ill which they equate with “division” (fitna in Arabic). They feel that their moves to politically collectivize the Muslim community, or the “ummah,” can never be challenged. They ignore the fact that the political collectivization of Muslims runs contrary to the national interests of our collective nation and our citizenship. For the few who do accept the challenge they do so only on their terms, privately, within the community, away from media and away from any accountability to the greater American community.

This blind collectivism is the exact reason the Muslim mind in so many mosques and activist organizations is hopelessly and cowardly paralyzed in apologetics and victimization. The Islamists are thereby easily able to muster the courage of their faulty convictions enough to champion political Islam and secure its stranglehold upon the public manifestation of the Muslim consciousness.

. . . Once we understand the relationship of political Islam and its various permutations from Wahhabism to salafism to deobandism to militant Islamism and its terror, we will be able to effectuate and progress a global anti-Islamist movement.

Debates like the one which occurred last week in Florida are the beginning of a “contest” of ideas which will herald either the victory of post-modern Islam over theocratic Islam or the converse. Global security and the continuation of American society as we know it hangs in the balance. . . .

Read the entire article. And show your support for AIFD. Arrayed against AIFD are the vast petrodollars that have built thousands of Wahhabi mosques in the West and populated them with clerics trained in the Wahhabi / Salafi ideology to which Dr. Jasser stands opposed. If you wish to make a difference, give of your time and money to AIFD.

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The War of Ideas in Islam - The Debate

If you want to understand the war of ideas that is ongoing between the Wahhabi / Salafi vision of Islam and the many Muslims who stand opposed to that vision, you would do well to watch the following debate. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are necessary stop gaps to slow the aggression of the radical Islamists. But they will only be completely defeated in the realm of ideas. Dr. M. Zhudi Jasser, former U.S. Navy officer and the chairman of American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), is truly the most eloquent voice in America of a devout Muslim steadfastly opposed to ideals of radical Islamists.

On April 5, 2008 at Edison College in Naples, Florida, Dr. Jasser engaged in a formal debate over those ideas with a Salafi imam who advocates seperatism, the imposition of sharia law and the creation of an Islamic state. It is very educational and very much worth the time to watch. The theme of the debate was "Is the Establishment of the Islamic State a Clear Ideological Threat to the United States?"

NOTE: Part I is quite slow. You might want to start watching at Part 2.

Part I




Part II



Part III



Part IV



Part V



Part VI

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